For a Liberian Family, Ebola Turns Loving Care Into Deadly Risk

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Ebola Ravages a Liberian Family

Ebola Ravages a Liberian Family

CreditDaniel Berehulak for The New York Times

MONROVIA, Liberia — Days after Kaizer Dour died of Ebola at the edge of a mangrove swamp, strangers carried his rotting corpse in a dugout canoe for a secret burial. Out on an uninhabited, bush-covered island, far from the national basketball court where Kaizer won acclaim as one of Liberia’s most valuable players last season, the strangers fulfilled one of the most important duties of a Liberian family — burying the young man.

One of the men stood knee-deep in a shallow grave, shoveling sand over Kaizer’s 6-foot-2-inch body. The other, having steeled himself with swigs of a local gin called Manpower, gave a speech to bid Kaizer farewell in the absence of mourners.

“Your whole entire family, no one is here to represent you,” the man intones, his words captured in a cellphone video. “Your mother gave a rose that we should bury with you to remember her. She tried her best, but she was alone.”

The burial, one of countless unlisted deaths in the deadliest Ebola outbreak in history, was an anonymous end for a middle-class young man on the cusp of celebrity. A rising star in Liberia’s top basketball league, Kaizer, 22, had dreamed of making it to the Los Angeles Lakers, the home of his idol and fellow shooting guard, Kobe Bryant. His Facebook profile, updated just three weeks before his death on Aug. 9, shows him spinning a basketball, an overhead light beaming down on a face bearing a young man’s self-assuredness.

A proper burial surely would have drawn hundreds of people — teammates, friends, fans and members of his large family, for whom Kaizer was an enduring point of pride. But this strange, horrific disease called Ebola, new to this part of Africa, had already started dismantling his unusually tight family, bringing fear, anger and ultimately death to the people who cherished him.

Ebola is a family disease, Liberians are reminded continually in Sunday sermons. The more families pull together to fight the virus, the more they seem to fall apart.

Kaizer’s extensive family had survived Liberia’s 14-year civil war, growing stronger as it united against poverty, rapacious rulers and indifferent governments. So when Kaizer got sick, his mother, Mamie Doryen, did what the Doryens had always done, turning to her family to help with her ailing son.

Kaizer, infected by his father, soon passed the virus to two aunts. In all, seven members from three generations died in quick succession. His mother, the family’s dominant figure, survived. But blamed for the calamity, she went into hiding, a pariah in her family’s hour of greatest need. The family’s center could not hold.

“Ebola was like a bomb,” one of Kaizer’s uncles said.

This destruction of families is the central tragedy of the epidemic. On a continent with many weak states, the extended family is Africa’s most important institution by far. That is especially true in the nations ravaged by the disease — Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea — three of Africa’s poorest and most fragile countries. Ebola’s effects on the region, in undermining the very institution that has kept its societies together, could be long-term and far-reaching.

Even today, as help increases from the United States and other nations, many victims in the region are still being treated within the family, a place of succor — and a font of contagion.

“They were together, a strong family, but this Ebola broke the entire family apart,” said the Rev. James Narmah, a Pentecostal minister who knows Kaizer’s family. “That’s what’s happening right now. Ebola is bringing a lot of divisions, a lot of hatred, inside families and inside communities, everywhere.”

Recovering From Ebola

These articles, reported over a period of eight months, chronicle the devastating impact of Ebola on a family, health clinic and church in Monrovia. All three belonged to a single chain of infection that killed dozens of people.

A Battle-Tested Family

Kaizer’s maternal grandparents, Joseph and Martha Doryen, had five sons and five daughters. All survived Liberia’s civil war from 1989 to 2003, a brutal one even by the standards of African wars of that era.

Before the fighting started, when rebels tried to oust the military dictatorship, Joseph Doryen worked as a driver at the agriculture ministry and then for a rich Ghanaian businessman. After the businessman fled the war, Joseph Doryen began growing potato greens in his Monrovia neighborhood, Capitol Hill. The children helped, and his wife sold the crop at a local market.

Until Joseph Doryen died three years ago, the old couple could often be seen strolling or sitting together under the mango tree behind their home. Their 10 children were all “same father, same mother,” a rarity in a large family of that generation.

They were also comparatively fortunate, escaping the rockets that frequently rained on Capitol Hill, destroying houses and killing residents.

Like its American model in Washington, the neighborhood derives its name from the nearby Capitol Building — one of the many ties between the United States and Liberia, a country founded by freed American slaves in 1822. But being next to Liberia’s seat of government made the neighborhood a frequent target.

Not even the war, however, was as bad as Ebola, the family said.

“Even when we were fighting war at that time, you know the safe place to go,” said Anthony Doryen, 39, the second-oldest son. “This one, you can’t even know where to go.”

“Ebola is a disease that eliminates families,” he added. “It makes you afraid because when you get around your family, apparently you get in contact with it. It makes you go far away from your family.”

Today, Capitol Hill’s dirt paths snake around houses with corrugated roofs held down by heavy rocks. To the east, the Temple of Justice peeks above the palm trees. The president’s Executive Mansion is a quick walk to the south. The Liberian flag outside government buildings — red and white stripes, with a white star in a blue box — can easily be mistaken for the American flag.

For the Doryens, postwar Liberia led to better lives. Like most residents, they still got their water from aging, unsanitary wells. But because they had property in Capitol Hill, they were better off than most, with steady jobs as gas station attendants, government cafeteria workers, cellphone-card salesmen and market traders.

Just as they had during wartime, the Doryens pulled together during peacetime. The children built separate houses near their parents and tore down the flimsy old family home, pooling their savings to build an eight-room concrete dwelling. It offered stability, cohesion — and a refuge for an ailing Kaizer.

A Father on Ebola’s Front Line

For most West Africans infected during the outbreak, the virus was transmitted quietly, through tender acts of love and kindness, at home where the sick were taken care of, or at a funeral where the dead were tended to.

Photo

Kaizer Dour, 22, in his Facebook profile photo.

But for Kaizer’s father, Edwin Dour, Ebola came violently on the night of June 25 after a gravely ill man — Patient Zero to the Doryen family — was brought to the beleaguered government-run clinic where Kaizer’s father was the chief administrator.

Six of 29 employees at the clinic died within a month of Ebola’s arrival. Kaizer’s father, known for never turning away patients, became infected, too, passing the virus to his son in a pattern seen across the city. The sick brought Ebola to defenseless health centers that in turn often helped spread the virus.

Despite the money that the United States and other governments had funneled into Liberia’s health care system in recent years, health centers quickly crumpled. The 16-year-old girl who had brought the disease from Sierra Leone to Monrovia died in the state-run Redemption Hospital on May 25. A doctor and five nurses there, working without gloves or the basics of infection control, died in rapid succession.

Though Redemption often did not have running water, it was one of the biggest medical centers in Liberia. So after it was closed in a panic in June, the sick scattered to nearby clinics, including the one managed by Kaizer’s father. They were even less prepared to deal with Ebola’s onslaught.

On June 25, a yellow taxi dropped off a young man in front of the clinic’s gate. The patient, a church caretaker, had apparently become infected when an old woman with Ebola was brought in for prayers. By the time the caretaker showed up at Kaizer’s father’s clinic, he was exhibiting the full-blown symptoms of late-stage Ebola: vomiting, diarrhea and — a peculiar sign of Ebola — uncontrollable hiccups.

Around 10 p.m., the sick man became violent and confused. “He was fighting — unstable — he was just going up and down, coming down on the bed, turning this way, that way,” said the physician assistant on duty, Moses Safa.

The guard held the man down. “Then he gave up the ghost,” Mr. Safa said.

The guard himself would soon die of Ebola, though not before transmitting it to Kaizer’s father. The clinic’s medical staff, terrified by the deaths at the state hospital, offered the ailing guard minimal care. Kaizer’s father was not authorized to provide care, but he volunteered to put the guard on an intravenous drip — and was infected in the process.

Kaizer’s father tested positive for Ebola, but the government did not tell his family. In theory, workers are supposed to inform families of test results; in practice, few tests have been carried out and the results rarely provided — another systematic failure that has contributed to Ebola’s spread.

Kaizer’s father, who was in his mid-40s, died July 23. Because his parents had separated years before, Kaizer helped tend to his dying father. But as has been the case for thousands who have died during this epidemic, the natural inclination to care for a loved one would prove his undoing.

On Aug. 9, Kaizer’s father was laid to rest at Good Shepherd Funeral Home in a closed coffin. Though the funeral hall could hold 100 people, only about 20 came, mostly workers from the clinic and friends from the father’s days as a soldier in the Liberian Army.

No family member came.

Shared Denial and Death

Overwhelmed by Kaizer’s illness, Mamie Doryen had brought him by taxi to her family in Capitol Hill. As day broke, the neighbors learned that an ailing Kaizer had been carried in overnight.

The Doryen family has lived in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Monrovia, the Liberian capital, since before the country's 14-year civil war began in 1989.Credit
Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times

Fear spread quickly. The neighbors, who knew that Kaizer’s father had died, lived in close quarters and shared a well with the Doryens.

It was early August, and the government, reeling from the deaths at Redemption and other health facilities, was paralyzed. Many Liberians remained deeply skeptical of Ebola’s very existence, suspicious of government corruption. The government slogan — “Ebola Is Real,” written on billboards and posters — merely reinforced the popular belief that it was not.

Still, enough deaths had occurred in the capital that, for many, any illness immediately caused suspicion of Ebola.

“We, who had family around there, were getting afraid,” said Teddy Dowee, 21, a friend of Kaizer’s and the Doryen clan. “I was afraid.”

It is perhaps a peculiarity of the psychological response to Ebola that people outside an affected family, like the Doryens’ neighbors, were often better able to grasp the reality around them.

Those inside the family often wrapped themselves in layers of denial, as impermeable as the protective suits worn by health care workers. They denied Ebola’s presence in the family to avoid being ostracized — and to convince themselves that they could tend to a sick loved one.

They often had no choice: Throughout the Ebola hot zone, the chronic lack of treatment beds for months forced families to care for the sick at home.

And so Mamie denied that Ebola had killed her former husband, Edwin Dour, and sickened Kaizer. Instead, they had both been poisoned, she insisted, telling her family of a mysterious woman in black terrorizing Kaizer in his sleep.

Some of those closest to Mamie accepted the poisoning story, a widespread belief in Liberia. They had reason to put faith in her. She was the family anchor, a woman of about 40 whose real name was Yah but was always called Mamie because she acted like a mother to her younger siblings.

So the family allowed Kaizer to stay, sharing one room with three family members — all of whom would die.

As Kaizer remained inside, the neighbors demanded that the Doryens take him away, threatening to call the authorities. But the poisoning story gave the psychological room for his relatives — caught between their love for him and the fear of Ebola — to take care of him.

How Ebola Spread in the Doryen Family

Edwin Dour contracted Ebola at his clinic from a guard who got it from a patient who checked in June 25. Mr. Dour passed the virus on to his son, Kaizer.

Mamie Doryen,

Around 40

Edwin Dour, Mid-40s

Died July 23

Martha Doryen, 60s

Died Aug. 31

Kaizer Dour, 22

Died Aug. 9

Joseph Doryen

Died in 2011

Lester Morris,

27

Tina Doryen, 20

Died Aug. 27

After Kaizer’s mother took him to her family’s home, Kaizer’s aunts Tina and Edwina and his grandmother Martha also contracted the disease. Mr. Morris, Tina’s estranged husband and Esther’s father, did not visit Tina and Esther, fearing infection. Mr. Jerry is the only member of the family to have contracted Ebola and survived.

Esther, 5

Died Sept. 7

Edwina Doryen, 24

Died Aug. 27

Mark Jerry,

27

Princess, 9

Died Sept. 15

Mamie Doryen,

Around 40

Edwin Dour,

Mid-40s

Died July 23

Kaizer Dour, 22

Died Aug. 9

Martha Doryen, 60s

Died Aug. 31

Lester

Morris,

27

Tina Doryen, 20

Died Aug. 27

Esther, 5

Died Sept. 7

Edwina Doryen, 24

Died Aug. 27

Mark

Jerry,

27

Princess, 9

Died Sept. 15

After Kaizer’s mother took him to her family’s home, Kaizer’s aunts Tina and Edwina and his grandmother Martha also contracted the disease. Mr. Morris, Tina’s estranged husband and Esther’s father, did not visit Tina and Esther, fearing infection. Mr. Jerry is the only member of the family to have contracted Ebola and survived.

Mamie Doryen,

Around 40

Edwin Dour,

Mid-40s

Died July 23

Martha Doryen, 60s

Died Aug. 31

Kaizer Dour, 22

Died Aug. 9

Joseph Doryen

Died in 2011

Tina Doryen, 20

Died Aug. 27

Lester Morris,

27

After Kaizer’s mother took him to her family’s home, Kaizer’s aunts Tina and Edwina and his grandmother Martha also contracted the disease. Mr. Morris, Tina’s estranged husband and Esther’s father, did not visit Tina and Esther, fearing infection. Mr. Jerry is the only member of the family to have contracted Ebola and survived.

Esther, 5

Died Sept. 7

Edwina Doryen, 24

Died Aug. 27

Mark Jerry,

27

Princess, 9

Died Sept. 15

One morning, Tina Doryen, an aunt tending to Kaizer, took a bath using a bucket in which he had previously vomited. “If that Ebola want to kill me, let it kill me,” she said, Mr. Dowee recalled.

With Kaizer’s condition worsening, the Doryens finally took him outside — to a nearby church that was holding a two-week revival.

It was already dark and the reverend, Mr. Narmah, was wrapping up a sermon on hope when the double doors of the church opened suddenly. Kaizer staggered in, his large frame supported on either side by his two favorite aunts — Tina, 20, and Edwina, 24. With Ebola in mind, the reverend instructed the aunts, both members of his church, to stay at the back with Kaizer.

“He had no strength,” Mr. Narmah said. “He couldn’t talk.”

The congregation gathered around Kaizer for a prayer. Mr. Narmah poured anointing oil on Kaizer’s head. He told the members to stretch their arms toward Kaizer but to not touch him.

Kaizer’s family took no such precautions. To Martha Doryen, 29, another aunt, Kaizer was the kid nephew who had always asked her for a treat or pocket money. This year, seeing Kaizer play basketball for the first time — and play so well that a fan handed him $50 after the game — Martha realized with pride that he was “no small player.”

“They were afraid of Ebola,” Martha said of the church members. “It was my sister’s only son. How can I be afraid? I can’t lie. I touched him.”

The Doryens’ neighbors stepped up demands that Kaizer leave Capitol Hill as soon as possible. The Doryens acquiesced, telling Mamie to take her son.

‘There Was No Family’

Kaizer died the next morning in his mother’s home next to the swamp. No one from the family, except his grandmother, went there to help.

“We were angry and also afraid,” said Kaizer’s uncle, Abraham Keita.

Mamie continued to insist that Kaizer did not have Ebola. Perhaps because of her assurances, five church members joined around her son’s deathbed. As Kaizer lay dying, he said he saw the woman in black who had been beckoning to him in his troubled dreams. He could no longer hide from her, she told him, as those gathered around him prayed loudly in tongues.

Abruptly, Kaizer reached for his neck.

“He said he saw the woman, the spirit, standing over him, choking him,” said Rose Mombo, a church member there. “He was fighting.”

Kaizer, his eyes wide open, burst into tears, spat out something and died.

It happened just as his own father was being laid to rest. During the funeral service for Kaizer’s father, the scattered attendees learned that Kaizer had died as well.

Pastors at churches around Monrovia, like the one in the Capitol Hill neighborhood that the Doryen family attends, routinely remind parishioners that Ebola can be easily transmitted when caring for sick relatives.Credit
Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times

The government was still incapable of responding in the most basic ways, including collecting the highly infectious bodies of the Ebola dead. So two days after Kaizer’s death, the stench of his corpse seeping out toward her neighbors, his mother asked one of them, Jerome Mombo, to bury her son.

Mr. Mombo took precautions against Ebola, adding $15 of his own money to the $55 in American currency Kaizer’s mother had given him. He paid fishermen $60 and spent the rest on chlorine, a spray gun, six empty rice bags to sew together as a burial shroud and bottles of Manpower.

The men drank the gin before entering the room, then again inside.

“Otherwise, I couldn’t do it,” said Mr. Mombo, who later delivered the brief farewell for Kaizer. “I had to drink something to give me more power.”

Heavy rain allowed the fishermen to paddle all the way to a flooded area behind the home of Kaizer’s mother. Tony Kaba, 22, a basketball player and friend of Kaizer’s, stood at a distance and watched the men take the body away.

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It took half an hour down the Mesurado River to reach Kpoto Island, one of many uninhabited islands up a channel called Creek No. 2. With soft, sandy soil, Kpoto has long been used by the poor to bury their dead. Now, freshly dug graves are obvious in the thick bush.

Many relatives of Ebola victims are believed to have carried out secret burials across the region because bodies are simply not picked up in time, or the families do not want to surrender relatives for mass incinerations. Such burials are believed to contribute to a significant undercount of the Ebola dead in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Guinea.

For Kaizer’s team, the Timberwolves, his death upturned the future. It had planned to build the franchise around Kaizer, who seemed destined to become the top player in the Liberia Basketball Federation, said Jairus Harris, the team’s vice president.

Kaizer was fast, shot well and fearlessly challenged any opponent. Over the years, two Liberians had come close to playing in the National Basketball Association in the United States, a source of pride for Liberian basketball.

“Kaizer would have made it in the N.B.A.,” Mr. Harris said. “I’m sure.”

Instead, his mother returned alone to Capitol Hill, seeking the comfort that the Doryens had always provided one another. But things were different this time. The consequences of the family’s rallying around Kaizer were quickly becoming clear.

Kaizer’s two favorite aunts, the ones who had held him up in church, died on the same day, Aug. 27, less than three weeks after he did. Kaizer’s grandmother and a cousin were visibly sick, too. Some of Kaizer’s uncles had fled Capitol Hill. The remaining Doryens gathered in a daze.

“It was a scene to behold,” said the Rev. Alvin Attah, who has known the family for decades. At the pastor’s urging, Kaizer’s grandmother boarded an ambulance to a treatment center.

Where Are the Most New Ebola Cases Being Reported?

Note: Data is incomplete for certain time periods and locations because of the difficulties in collecting data in outbreak areas. Many officials believe that the number of cases and deaths are undercounted, but by how much is unknown.

Source: United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, The Humanitarian Data Exchange

Blamed for bringing Ebola to Capitol Hill, Kaizer’s mother could not return to her family home. She wandered toward her church half a mile away and knocked on the homes of congregation members, searching for a place to spend the night.

“But they refused to let her in,” said Felicia Koneh, a family friend. “Everybody was afraid. No one knows where she went after that.”

“It’s pathetic, you know, to see a family just fall apart,” she said.

Distance and Guilt

Ebola is an insidious disease. It turns compassion into a danger. It turns survival into a haunting source of guilt.

Kaizer’s cousin, Esther, 5, the daughter of his beloved Aunt Tina, was clearly sick. On the day Tina died, Esther’s father faced the anguish of going to see his ailing daughter in Capitol Hill — but being too afraid to get close enough to comfort her.

“She tried to get to me, but I stood at a distance,” said her father, Lester Morris, 27, who had separated from Tina this year. “I told her to go to her Auntie Julie.”

The guilt and pain of trying to protect himself was wrapped in a tight knot inside him, a feeling shared by many other survivors.

“To see a loved one separated from you, you talk on the telephone and say, ‘I’m dying,’ and you cannot go — it’s more painful than the war,” said Lester’s father, Joseph Morris.

It is a comparison heard often, one that may seem extreme. The war killed perhaps a quarter-million Liberians, Ebola only 2,800 officially in this country so far. The war’s destruction of Monrovia can still be seen in its broken roads, schools and buildings. Ebola has left no physical scar.

But to many Liberians, the pain of Ebola is greater. Often, the only sure way to survive is to abandon one’s family.

Esther’s father and uncle begged the government for help. The family repeatedly called its Ebola hotline to get her out of Capitol Hill, but received only empty promises.

It was late August, and the government was panicking. It had deployed soldiers to quarantine Monrovia’s largest slum, setting off deadly riots. The cost of paralysis by the international community was continuing to mount.

Body fluids and poor sanitation in and around homes in Monrovia make caring for relatives with Ebola perilous for families.Credit
Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times

The Doryens worried that Esther would infect them, as Kaizer had. On Aug. 31, one of the remaining aunts, Julie Doryen, guided the girl with a stick to the main road outside Capitol Hill. Esther collapsed on the sidewalk.

A large, angry crowd watched from across the street, drawing the police and, finally, an ambulance. Esther, who had appeared dead, stirred to life. Her father, Lester, arrived minutes after she was put inside the ambulance.

She was taken to an Ebola treatment center. Her father and uncle visited and thought she was doing better.

Before visiting again, Lester looked wistfully at a Christmas card from last year. In it, wearing a red dress with a big white ribbon, Esther stands against an idealized American backdrop of a colonial house, a green lawn and a white picket fence.

Overnight, her uncle received a call from a friend inside the center. Esther had died. He did not tell Lester. On the taxi ride there, Lester began to suspect his brother was hiding something. By the time they arrived in front of the center at 10:30 a.m., Lester was yelling at his brother. Lester paced back and forth, his eyes reddening.

“He’s weeping,” said a man nearby.

“Maybe somebody dying?” said another.

“Brother, you gotta be a man,” a taxi driver said. “Be a man, yeah? Don’t be crying.”

Lester did not cry inside the center when told about his daughter’s death. He said nothing. His brother asked for the body for a proper funeral, or at least a photograph. Neither was possible.

The brothers went to Capitol Hill to inform the Doryens. The remaining family gathered outside. Martha Doryen, Kaizer’s aunt, started wailing, throwing her hands in the air. There were no tears, but the sound echoed throughout Capitol Hill.

With no body to bury, Lester could not meet his traditional duties. Suddenly, he started crying, uncontrollably, tears streaming down his face. The women, and his brother, looked away.

Coming to Grips

Within hours of the death of Kaizer’s Aunt Tina, the other aunt who had held him up in church, Edwina Doryen, died as well. Two weeks later, her husband, Mark Jerry, sat slumped outside an Ebola treatment center. Their daughter Princess sat to his right, resting her forehead against the wall. Both were too weak even to drink water.

For days, Mark had maintained his denials about the family illnesses. He was sick, too, but told friends he had typhoid and switched off his cellphone. After Princess fell ill, things changed.

Martha Doryen and other relatives grieved after hearing news that Esther, 5, died of Ebola.Credit
Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times

“I’m convinced it was Ebola,” Mark said.

It was mid-September, and Liberia stood on a precipice. Monrovia had become the focal point of the outbreak in West Africa. Infections were doubling every two to three weeks.

Mark and Princess were lucky to receive treatment at all. But while Mark, 27, improved, Princess, 9, did not. She died within days.

After being discharged with a letter that he was “no longer infectious,” Mark began working for Doctors Without Borders. Once a denier of Ebola, he became an evangelist.

Mark, a money changer, and Kaizer’s Aunt Edwina, a restaurant worker, had spent years saving $900 to build their home, a simple structure steps away from the Doryen house. He had suspected that Kaizer had Ebola. The unease felt by the Doryens’ neighbors in Capitol Hill had unsettled him.

But he had blocked out those doubts when Edwina got sick. What else could he do but take care of her?

“Edwina and I were like one person,” he said. “I would bathe her. She was toileting all day. I would clean her, and then after two, three minutes, she would toilet. I would clean her again.”

He took her to a local clinic, where they were told that she had a chest cold. Finally, with Edwina unable to walk and bleeding from the mouth, Mark carried her on his back and put her in a taxi to the hospital. Turned away for lack of beds, she was taken to an Ebola holding center. She died there the next day, on a brown mattress on a filthy floor, surrounded by body fluids.

A rage built within him. All the suffering — all the pointless deaths in the family — stemmed from a betrayal, he said: Mamie’s refusal to admit what was wrong with Kaizer.

She had at least suspected the truth, Mark said. Once Edwina became symptomatic, Kaizer’s mother, the progenitor of the poisoning narrative, offered a suspicious warning.

“She said, ‘Mark, the way you’re taking care of Edwina, you got to get chlorine water on the side, and when you finish taking care of her, you wash your hands,’ ” he recalled.

“She acted very bad, my sister-in-law; she knew that her son had the virus and she never educated us,” Mark said. “To me, she was wicked. I don’t call that ignorance. I call that wickedness.”

Princess Whergar and her father, Mark Jerry, were taken by ambulance from her grandmother's house in Monrovia, Liberia, to Redemption Hospital.Credit
Daniel Berehulak for The New York Times

Adrift in Anger

The disappearance of Kaizer’s mother quickly set the Doryens adrift, leaving them to endure one loss after another without their central figure.

Four of Kaizer’s aunts and cousins died in a month. Kaizer’s grandmother died, too, on Aug. 31. But the Doryens did not even find out about her death for nearly two weeks. Mamie, as the head of the family, gave her cellphone as a contact number when the ambulance took away the grandmother. When Mamie disappeared, health officials were unable to contact the Doryens.

Mamie’s absence stirred fierce disagreement, another source of division in the family. Some saw it as proof of her deception. Others, like her brother, Anthony Doryen, imagined her grief.

“Everybody is angry with her,” he said. But “she herself lose her mother, she lose her son, she lose two sisters.”

As word of the family deaths in Capitol Hill spread to Mamie’s neighbors near the swamp, they grew alarmed. Mr. Mombo, who buried Kaizer, reached Mamie by phone after many attempts.

“Why you running from place to place?” Mr. Mombo asked her. “But since then, her phone is switched off.”

Mamie insisted in a brief phone interview that Kaizer was poisoned and died after the woman in black told him he was “finished.”

“Nobody should blame me,” she added. “The devil is very busy. The Capitol Hill people saying I’m the one carrying Ebola there. All my family dying.”

Forgiveness and Hope

By late September, after the death of Kaizer and six of his close relatives, the sickness seemed at bay. Twenty-three days had passed since the last sick family member was taken out of Capitol Hill, two days beyond Ebola’s maximum incubation period.

“It’s good to stay alive,” said Abraham Keita, Kaizer’s uncle.

He smiled, stretched and brought out a DVD, “Monrovia on Fire,” a local martial arts film in which he had a supporting role. He hoped for a bigger part in a sequel. Mr. Keita, a furniture maker and taekwondo master, was planning for the future.

One of the Doryen brothers had returned to Capitol Hill, though he still kept his wife and children away. Mr. Keita hoped the other Doryens would follow, including Mamie.

“Before, yes, I was angry,” he said. “Everybody was angry with her.” He laughed. “Now I can forgive her. That’s what God says.”

“Maybe after one month, two months, she will come back, because we are the same family.”

In Liberia, too, the mood has begun to shift. New Ebola cases have dropped significantly, leading some international and local health officials to say they are making headway against the disease. On Thursday, President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf lifted the state of emergency imposed on the country, saying “we can all be proud of the progress.”

Weeks earlier, Martha Doryen, Kaizer’s aunt, stood outside her house. A cellphone number and “Yah” — Mamie’s real name — were scribbled on the front wall with charcoal.

Mamie’s new cellphone number?

Instead, Martha looked at her 13-year-old daughter, who had just celebrated receiving her first cellphone by writing the number on the house. Her name is also Yah. Thirteen years ago, Martha asked her big sister, Mamie, to name her firstborn. Mamie named the girl after herself, Yah, a new generation’s hour come round at last.

Then, almost as an afterthought, Martha mentioned that Mamie had called that morning, the first time since she was forced from Capitol Hill a month earlier. Martha was sitting on her porch making dry rice with fish. An unknown number had flashed on her cellphone.

“She says she’s fine,” Martha said. “She’s just telling us to wash our hands, stay away from people and be with ourselves. Because herself, she is O.K., taking the same advice she gave us.”

Clair MacDougall contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on November 14, 2014, on Page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: A Family Shattered: Ebola Turns Loving Care Into Deadly Risk. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe